Well, depending on what compatability libraries you have, it is possible to trivial. I know GLQuake1 worked on my Linux box until I upgraded everything to Glibc-2.1. It worked on kernels 2.0 and 2.2. Fortunately, id released the source and I was able to re-compile and get it functional again. I imagine that for most Linux games it would be similar.
Unlike Windows, Linux code isn't constantly being changed to lock out competitors. So a re-compile could quite possibly be all it takes. Besides, the guys at Loki Software are really great about listing to users (I constantly see them in their newsgroups) and having spoken with the lead programmer several times, I'm fairly sure it would be possible to keep up with changing Linux distros.
Oh, one other thing I forgot about until just now. Loki compiles all their games to be static binaries, so they should work on ANY libc. And the kernel API has remained consistant through the entire 2.x development, so that shouldn't be a problem.
If I had any non-X86 processors what you've stated would probably mean more to me than it does. However I do know that Loki does their best to support non-Intel hardware. I know they've been working on PPC and Alpha ports of Civ:CTP for a while. Unfortunately I haven't kept up.
Being a former SysOp and long-time BBS user myself, I watched about the same thing happen. Back in 1993, I used a DOS-based program called Telemate to connect to about forty BBS's in the city, about ten of them on a daily basis. By 1996, most of them were gone. By 1998, all but a handful of die-hard BBSes are gone, and those are generally elated to have a new user.
I used to think it was hopeless and that the community that had helped me realize what computers could do and how they could connect people--the community that had introduced me to Linux--was completely gone. I still had my BBS, but one call per week was hardly enough to justify staying off the Internet for me. And while I loved forums like Slashdot and Freshmeat, none of them gave me the tight-knit sense of community that I had with the old school BBS's.
There was a tiny glimmer of hope, however. Many BBSes had managed to get themselves setup as telnet sites. I found one large and very active one in the Netherlands (Fluxpod Information Exchange) that reminded me of what they used to be like, and the wave of nostalgia washed over me and has not completely abated since. I began to search for other online BBSes (telnet but in the old-style). I found quite a few; The Hard Drive Cafe, Eagle's Dare and quite a few others. I also found that some BBS software is not entirely dead. A lot of the BBSes I used to use were based on WWIV and in fact, they still exist and are developing 4.30 to have telnet capabilities.
I also got in touch with a guy who was developing a Linux version of WWIV. WWIV/X was born and is steadily progressing toward a stable, full-featured release. I wish that I could report that WWIV/X will be Open Source, but since WWIV is not, and WWIV/X uses WWIV for the vast majority of its code, it will most likely be under the same license as WWIV (Shareware 60-day trial). However, I am working on other BBS-related projects that will be under Open Source licenses, but none of them are far-enough along to make any kind of real announcement. If you want more information, e-mail me.
Having been around the "online world" for a number of years, meeting someone online seems to me to be pretty much like meeting anyone anywhere else in the world.
My best friends met each other through an online BBS about seven years ago. They helped each other through some extremely rough times before marrying in 1997. Everyone I know is extremely jealous of them because after seven years together (four of them full-time) their "spark" is still there.
Another friend I have met her husband (Married recently) on a dating service. They are an odd-couple, but they are happy together.
Another friend met her boyfriend on the same BBS my best friends met on. She was engaged for a while, then broke things off. Now they're back together.
Myself, I dated one girl I met online. Things didn't work out, but it was a hell of a ride.
re: RPMS I've run into occasional RPM difficulties upgrading packages, but that is generally solved if you're running the current RedHat release (I'm not but that's a different story). As for a central repository for RPMS, you've obviously never heard of rufus (Also called RPMFIND. It's a computer with about 60GIG of RPMs for just about all RPM-based distributions. The webmaster has also written a program called rpmfind which will search rufus (or other rpmfind mirrors) for packages you specify. It will find the latest, suggest upgraded packages, even find source packages. It rocks.
re: General flakiness You had flakeyness with RedHat 5.2? I find that odd. I had problems with all.0 releases, but the.2's have always been stable for me (I've been using RedHat since 3.0.3). But then again, I imagine if you've been having problems mixing RPM and non-RPM packages, it's conceivable.
Yes, RedHat 5.2 shipped with several buggy packages, but if you've ever been to their errata pages, you can download the latest packages to correct the problems. I still run RedHat 5.2 boxes. Now that RedHat 6.1 has come out, I may take another crack at it on my test systems.
While it is true that it can be side-stepped if it's in the registry, anyone smart enough and devious enough to want to install software like this would find a way to do it without allowing a user to disable it. Yes, they can do that. Here's how:
1) Policy Editor. If you're running Windows on a large network, and especially if you got an MCSE or MCP from a creditable school, you came in contact with the Policy Editor. It was a great tool for taking control away from clients. With it, you could lock just about any part of Windows, including REGEDIT. Want to get into Network in the Control Panel? "This function has been disabled by your network administrator." REGEDIT? "Registry editing has been disabled..." Get the picture?
2) Windows NT Logon scripts. Those run any time you log into an NT-controlled domain. You can stop them from running, but that is also likely to stop your login process and deny you access to vital network resources (The company's knowledge base for instance). If they start SMS, WhoWhatWhenWhere, or Bo2k from there, you can't stop it, and with at least some of those programs, they don't come up in the Process List.
As for how legal and ethical it is, there's no law preventing it currently so--sadly--it is legal. It is far from ethical though. Most companies don't use it to monitor their hardware. Most companies use piece of junk P133's that have more than lived a useful life. They don't need a program like this to see if you're sucking up 2/3 of a T1 line downloading pr0n. They do things like this to make sure you're not stealing their "valuable intelectual property" (read: dirty company secrets).
One company I worked at used the Policy Editor heavily. They had.reg files that imported whenever you logged onto their Netware or NT domains. There was no way for anyone to stop them, and they used this to keep the highly-techno-savvy support department in a tight grip of fear. We let them get away with this because there were no jobs better than flipping burgers for more than forty miles in any direction, period.
At the last company I worked for, we didn't have Internet access, they had that blocked both ways by the firewall, yet they still insisted on installing MS SMS on each and every one of our systems. Virtually everyone in the company was very loyal to the company and would never steal anything. As a matter of fact, there was only one employee who was terminated for violating policy, and that was for abusing the phone system, not the computers.
Considering only two of my close friends (About a dozen all together) use MSIE in any form, and neither of them will touch IE3. I know when I was forced to use it at my last job, I did everything I could, short of downloading IE4 to get around it (They would skin anyone caught using non-MS software, and some people wonder why I don't work there anymore).
However, we're not talking about going into a market that has one juggernaut that is growing fat and lazy (in the case of IE3, it was Netscape 3), we're talking about trying to invade a market that has not one but six major players (RedHat, SuSE, Caldera, Debian, Mandrake, and Slackware) and scores of smaller ones. On top of that, the market has a decidedly anti-Microsoft attitude.
Also, considering Microsoft has pulled ALL proposed support for ANY applications on Linux (They were working on NetShow, and MediaPlayer for Linux but those pages have since disappeared) I really don't think they'd honestly try to subvert us like that.
Hardly. If Microsoft tries to include even one major incompatability or serious bug, it will kill "L++". Unless they play by the same rules as RedHat, Debian, SuSE, Caldera, Slackware, Mandrake, Stampede, et. al, they stand no chance. This is no longer some winner-take-all market. The Linux distribution market is so large (Ask any *BSD developer) that if they want to have a prayer, they will have to drop their regular crap and at least try playing by the rules. Just claiming that it's Linux won't be good enough. And do you see Microsoft doing anything like that? I don't.
Hmm... Well, technicalities aside, the advantages that I can see are:
1) No/etc/password to crack. Protects users from their own stupidity if they have easy passwords. 2) No local password files to crack if you can break root on that machine (See point 1). 3) Central management of passwords. 4) Passwords probably don't use the same encryption scheme. Security through obscurity.
Cons:
1) If the password server is down, no one--NO ONE--could get in. (Could get around this, depending on how they have it setup) 2) Non-standard password setups, so new admins must be trained in their security model. (They might consider that an advantage) 3) More complex setup when installing a new box.
With Linux, you can use NIS, LDAP, and several others to do the same thing. For a large system, it might not be too bad of an idea.
What I did when I installed a new drive was basically the following:
0) Boot into Linux single mode (LILO: linux single). That will keep all your normal stuff from booting and create less potential conflicts.
1) Setup the partitions as you want them. Personally, I run a four-partition machine, and I recommend it to everyone I install Linux for. First partiton is about 200mb for the root directory. Second is a 24-128mb partition for swap space. Third is 350-1024mb for the/home directory. Fourth is whatever is left for the/usr directory; I recommend at least 1gb for a serious/usr partition.
(Why a multi-partiton system? Well, you can backup your important dirs (mainly/etc) to your/home directory (/home/etc) so you can format / and/usr, re-install, then restore them if any of your RedHat/SuSE/Caldara/Debian upgrades to south. Had to do that a couple of times.)
2) Format the new partition(s).
3) make a new directory called/new and mount your new partition(s) under that (/new/root,/new/home,/new/usr, etc.).
4) Use tar and a little black magic to copy your whole filesystem in one easy step:
(cwd:/) tar -cf - (all dirs except/new and/proc) | (cd/new ; tar -xvf - )
They're doing what they've always done, protecting their own interests. Microsoft has always been about one thing: Money. I realized it when I saw what they did back in August '95 with Windows 95. They slapped a slick NeXT'ish shell on a bloated, buggy, crackwhore of an OS. They want to draw people in with flash and fluff then gouge them for unnecessary upgrades and technical support.
Microsoft hates their customers. They say it when they blame others for obvious flaws in their products (Word virii, IIS exploits, Back Oriface, etc). They say it when they flash vaporware at people months/years before releasing the first crappy v1.0 beta. They say it when their EULA basically says "you're stuck with us now. Like it or lump it."
Their customers want something that's fast, stable, robust, and easy to administer. Now, since I'm a bit above the average Windows user (That's actually not meant to be boastful. It gets tiring when I'm constantly picking up other people's messes because I'm the only one who knows how) so to me, changing "MaxSpareServers" to a reasonable value in some.conf file seems more user friendly and easier to administer than trying to hunt through help files and an obtuse GUI to find the same setting in the laberynthine Windows Registry.
Microsoft could care less what their customers want. As long as people continue to pay them $90 for a bug-fix that's three years late, they'll continue to pay lip service to their customers (Remember, lies cost nothing) while they continue on their merry way to their next billion.
Offtopic: PHP3 isn't really something that can be compared with IIS. IIS is more appropriately compared with Apache, Zeus, Roxen Challenger, et al.
If you want to compare PHP3, compare it to ASP. I've not done much ASP work myself, but from what I've gathered, it's a way to embed dynamic content straight into HTML-esq pages and have the server execute them and spit out real HTML to the client. This is exactly what PHP3 does. I've used it and I find it quite powerful, particularly in the database integration field. It can be compiled with support for over a dozen different SQL database packages (Some of which I've never heard of, others I didn't know even had Linux clients). PHP3 can be compiled into a dynamicly loaded library that links it directly into Apache, giving it the same ability as IIS+ASP. There are even programs that will translate ASP pages to PHP3 pages (Check Freshmeat for it).
Something that bothered me about the Mindcraft studies that was partially explained in the earlier article posted here about saturating a T1/T3 on a single-processor Linux box, and still further explained in this article...
If NT is such hot stuff running a webserver, how come so many NT servers die horribly when they're slashdotted, yet slashdot (P2x2 256MB ram if I remember correctly) has enough processor time and bandwidth left over to customize the interface and most of the pages that it spits out? I have seen so many high-traffic NT sites bog down and sometimes just not respond when they get busy, yet most Linux/FreeBSD servers keep chugging right along.
In typical style, everyone has jumped the gun prematurely. After reading the article, I can see the author's fears, but I'm not sure how founded they are. After all, all we have right now is a deal between two companies and the words "RedHat Linux" in the System Requirements.
The author calls for everyone to support the LSB and boycott anyone who doesn't. Well, my follow-up to that is "Show me the LSB." Last I heard, the thing wasn't even FINISHED yet. How are we supposed to support something that is so anamorphous?
According to their official statements, RedHat is totally committed to the LSB, they just aren't crowing about it. They have said that they're going to wait until it's finished before they start making noise about it.
I do agree that it's presents a troubling future. I for one would cry if Linux ever became balkenized. However, unlike the author, I don't see that as happening very easily. It would take a major change in the attitude of the community to allow anything like that to happen. We'd all have to return to being lazy, grain-fed consumers.
The differences between Linux distributions is actually very minor. From experience, I can say that for the most part, they work pretty interchangeably. I've used Slackware and RedHat on my boxes and I've helped install SuSE on other machines. RedHat, Caldera, SuSE and others all use RPM as their packaging format. The major differences besides that are in the location of files and libraries. But any self-respecting programer DOESN'T hard-code library paths except under EXTREME circumstances. That and as long as you keep up on the versions of libraries, most programs can exist happily.
Even though I use RedHat and could probably pretty easily install CodeWarrior, that doesn't mean I'm not going to help anyone who wants to install it on SuSE, Debian, or whichever. I imagine the majority of Linux users have the same attitude.
How do you figure? I just ran it on my (nearly) stock RedHat 5.2 system (Kernel 2.0.36). I've got an SB16PnP and it works just fine for me. Audio/Video is at least as good as rvplayer 5.0gold. Only thing that's irritating to me is that it keeps coming up asking for registration, even though I registered it.
I find it extremely odd that this DH Brown article points out several "facts" without explaining a few basic things.
1) Linux doesn't do SMP well. What version of Linux are they testing? 2.0? 2.2? When it comes to SMP, there's a VAST difference.
2) Linux only supports up to 2gb of RAM. In its current form, yes. Linux only supports 2gb of RAM. However, I'm willing to bet my left maple nut that 4gb is on the TODO list for 2.3.
Beyond that, the article was mostly rhetoric and jargon designed to confuse and mislead people.
I know most people will never read this, but after reading that article, I can't help but let my fingers fly and write something about what the author (Who didn't include his e-mail address, so I can't address these to him) said.
While the article has a nice pipe-dream inspiring it, the author makes a number of fairly critical mistakes. Additionally, there are several incorrect assertions. I'm not sure if these are unintentional ignorance, or malicious attempts to spin what we're doing.
In the article, the author asks the question "Why don't we stop development on Linux and all other alternative operating systems and concentrate on making Windows 9x / 2000 better?"
The short answer: We can't.
The long answer: Microsoft controls Windows with an iron fist. They add what features they want and ignore everything else. They have no economic interest in spending the additional [mb]illions of hours it would take to rummage through however many millions of lines of code Windows is up to and find the bugs that plague the system. They're raking in cash hand over fist, what would they stand to gain? Reputation? I don't think even the Microsoft Marketing Minions could pull that off.
The author states that we don't want to because we're anti-establishment and think we have something to gain by challenging the Microsoft juggernaut. Again, he is half-right. While there is a certain element of disgust rumbling through the computer world right now, that isn't unjustified.
I cannot count the number of times a bug in Windows or some Windows application has taken my system completely down. I have talked to literally thousands of people who have had the same thing happen. I cannot count the times I have heard people curse Windows, Microsoft, or Bill Gates directly.
We can't fix any of those because we don't have any of the source code. We can submit bug reports or requests for features, but from experience, I know that those are pretty much ignored unless it's something someone on the development team wants. If they even make it to the development team. Many times in large corporations, they don't; someone somewhere filters them out for some reason or another.
Why do we continue to work on Linux? Simple disenchantment with Microsoft isn't enough reason to work on a project this big. Why can't these people understand that?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, depending on what compatability libraries you have, it is possible to trivial. I know GLQuake1 worked on my Linux box until I upgraded everything to Glibc-2.1. It worked on kernels 2.0 and 2.2. Fortunately, id released the source and I was able to re-compile and get it functional again. I imagine that for most Linux games it would be similar.
Unlike Windows, Linux code isn't constantly being changed to lock out competitors. So a re-compile could quite possibly be all it takes. Besides, the guys at Loki Software are really great about listing to users (I constantly see them in their newsgroups) and having spoken with the lead programmer several times, I'm fairly sure it would be possible to keep up with changing Linux distros.
Oh, one other thing I forgot about until just now. Loki compiles all their games to be static binaries, so they should work on ANY libc. And the kernel API has remained consistant through the entire 2.x development, so that shouldn't be a problem.
If I had any non-X86 processors what you've stated would probably mean more to me than it does. However I do know that Loki does their best to support non-Intel hardware. I know they've been working on PPC and Alpha ports of Civ:CTP for a while. Unfortunately I haven't kept up.
Being a former SysOp and long-time BBS user myself, I watched about the same thing happen. Back in 1993, I used a DOS-based program called Telemate to connect to about forty BBS's in the city, about ten of them on a daily basis. By 1996, most of them were gone. By 1998, all but a handful of die-hard BBSes are gone, and those are generally elated to have a new user.
I used to think it was hopeless and that the community that had helped me realize what computers could do and how they could connect people--the community that had introduced me to Linux--was completely gone. I still had my BBS, but one call per week was hardly enough to justify staying off the Internet for me. And while I loved forums like Slashdot and Freshmeat, none of them gave me the tight-knit sense of community that I had with the old school BBS's.
There was a tiny glimmer of hope, however. Many BBSes had managed to get themselves setup as telnet sites. I found one large and very active one in the Netherlands (Fluxpod Information Exchange) that reminded me of what they used to be like, and the wave of nostalgia washed over me and has not completely abated since. I began to search for other online BBSes (telnet but in the old-style). I found quite a few; The Hard Drive Cafe, Eagle's Dare and quite a few others. I also found that some BBS software is not entirely dead. A lot of the BBSes I used to use were based on WWIV and in fact, they still exist and are developing 4.30 to have telnet capabilities.
I also got in touch with a guy who was developing a Linux version of WWIV. WWIV/X was born and is steadily progressing toward a stable, full-featured release. I wish that I could report that WWIV/X will be Open Source, but since WWIV is not, and WWIV/X uses WWIV for the vast majority of its code, it will most likely be under the same license as WWIV (Shareware 60-day trial). However, I am working on other BBS-related projects that will be under Open Source licenses, but none of them are far-enough along to make any kind of real announcement. If you want more information, e-mail me.
Having been around the "online world" for a number of years, meeting someone online seems to me to be pretty much like meeting anyone anywhere else in the world.
My best friends met each other through an online BBS about seven years ago. They helped each other through some extremely rough times before marrying in 1997. Everyone I know is extremely jealous of them because after seven years together (four of them full-time) their "spark" is still there.
Another friend I have met her husband (Married recently) on a dating service. They are an odd-couple, but they are happy together.
Another friend met her boyfriend on the same BBS my best friends met on. She was engaged for a while, then broke things off. Now they're back together.
Myself, I dated one girl I met online. Things didn't work out, but it was a hell of a ride.
re: RPMS
.0 releases, but the .2's have always been stable for me (I've been using RedHat since 3.0.3). But then again, I imagine if you've been having problems mixing RPM and non-RPM packages, it's conceivable.
I've run into occasional RPM difficulties upgrading packages, but that is generally solved if you're running the current RedHat release (I'm not but that's a different story). As for a central repository for RPMS, you've obviously never heard of rufus (Also called RPMFIND. It's a computer with about 60GIG of RPMs for just about all RPM-based distributions. The webmaster has also written a program called rpmfind which will search rufus (or other rpmfind mirrors) for packages you specify. It will find the latest, suggest upgraded packages, even find source packages. It rocks.
re: General flakiness
You had flakeyness with RedHat 5.2? I find that odd. I had problems with all
Yes, RedHat 5.2 shipped with several buggy packages, but if you've ever been to their errata pages, you can download the latest packages to correct the problems. I still run RedHat 5.2 boxes. Now that RedHat 6.1 has come out, I may take another crack at it on my test systems.
While it is true that it can be side-stepped if it's in the registry, anyone smart enough and devious enough to want to install software like this would find a way to do it without allowing a user to disable it. Yes, they can do that. Here's how:
.reg files that imported whenever you logged onto their Netware or NT domains. There was no way for anyone to stop them, and they used this to keep the highly-techno-savvy support department in a tight grip of fear. We let them get away with this because there were no jobs better than flipping burgers for more than forty miles in any direction, period.
1) Policy Editor. If you're running Windows on a large network, and especially if you got an MCSE or MCP from a creditable school, you came in contact with the Policy Editor. It was a great tool for taking control away from clients. With it, you could lock just about any part of Windows, including REGEDIT. Want to get into Network in the Control Panel? "This function has been disabled by your network administrator." REGEDIT? "Registry editing has been disabled..." Get the picture?
2) Windows NT Logon scripts. Those run any time you log into an NT-controlled domain. You can stop them from running, but that is also likely to stop your login process and deny you access to vital network resources (The company's knowledge base for instance). If they start SMS, WhoWhatWhenWhere, or Bo2k from there, you can't stop it, and with at least some of those programs, they don't come up in the Process List.
As for how legal and ethical it is, there's no law preventing it currently so--sadly--it is legal. It is far from ethical though. Most companies don't use it to monitor their hardware. Most companies use piece of junk P133's that have more than lived a useful life. They don't need a program like this to see if you're sucking up 2/3 of a T1 line downloading pr0n. They do things like this to make sure you're not stealing their "valuable intelectual property" (read: dirty company secrets).
One company I worked at used the Policy Editor heavily. They had
At the last company I worked for, we didn't have Internet access, they had that blocked both ways by the firewall, yet they still insisted on installing MS SMS on each and every one of our systems. Virtually everyone in the company was very loyal to the company and would never steal anything. As a matter of fact, there was only one employee who was terminated for violating policy, and that was for abusing the phone system, not the computers.
Considering only two of my close friends (About a dozen all together) use MSIE in any form, and neither of them will touch IE3. I know when I was forced to use it at my last job, I did everything I could, short of downloading IE4 to get around it (They would skin anyone caught using non-MS software, and some people wonder why I don't work there anymore).
However, we're not talking about going into a market that has one juggernaut that is growing fat and lazy (in the case of IE3, it was Netscape 3), we're talking about trying to invade a market that has not one but six major players (RedHat, SuSE, Caldera, Debian, Mandrake, and Slackware) and scores of smaller ones. On top of that, the market has a decidedly anti-Microsoft attitude.
Also, considering Microsoft has pulled ALL proposed support for ANY applications on Linux (They were working on NetShow, and MediaPlayer for Linux but those pages have since disappeared) I really don't think they'd honestly try to subvert us like that.
Hardly. If Microsoft tries to include even one major incompatability or serious bug, it will kill "L++". Unless they play by the same rules as RedHat, Debian, SuSE, Caldera, Slackware, Mandrake, Stampede, et. al, they stand no chance. This is no longer some winner-take-all market. The Linux distribution market is so large (Ask any *BSD developer) that if they want to have a prayer, they will have to drop their regular crap and at least try playing by the rules. Just claiming that it's Linux won't be good enough. And do you see Microsoft doing anything like that? I don't.
Hmm... Well, technicalities aside, the advantages that I can see are:
/etc/password to crack. Protects users from their own stupidity if they have easy passwords.
1) No
2) No local password files to crack if you can break root on that machine (See point 1).
3) Central management of passwords.
4) Passwords probably don't use the same encryption scheme. Security through obscurity.
Cons:
1) If the password server is down, no one--NO ONE--could get in. (Could get around this, depending on how they have it setup)
2) Non-standard password setups, so new admins must be trained in their security model. (They might consider that an advantage)
3) More complex setup when installing a new box.
With Linux, you can use NIS, LDAP, and several others to do the same thing. For a large system, it might not be too bad of an idea.
What I did when I installed a new drive was basically the following:
/home directory. Fourth is whatever is left for the /usr directory; I recommend at least 1gb for a serious /usr partition.
/etc) to your /home directory (/home/etc) so you can format / and /usr, re-install, then restore them if any of your RedHat/SuSE/Caldara/Debian upgrades to south. Had to do that a couple of times.)
/new and mount your new partition(s) under that (/new/root, /new/home, /new/usr, etc.).
/) /new and /proc) | (cd /new ; tar -xvf - )
/new ; tar -xvf - ) )
/proc dir ("mkdir /new/proc").
/etc/fstab.
0) Boot into Linux single mode (LILO: linux single). That will keep all your normal stuff from booting and create less potential conflicts.
1) Setup the partitions as you want them. Personally, I run a four-partition machine, and I recommend it to everyone I install Linux for. First partiton is about 200mb for the root directory. Second is a 24-128mb partition for swap space. Third is 350-1024mb for the
(Why a multi-partiton system? Well, you can backup your important dirs (mainly
2) Format the new partition(s).
3) make a new directory called
4) Use tar and a little black magic to copy your whole filesystem in one easy step:
(cwd:
tar -cf - (all dirs except
(ex: tar -cf - bin/ boot/ dev/ etc/ home/ lib/ lost+found/ mnt/ opt/ root/ sbin/ tmp/ usr/ var/ | (cd
You'll see all the files on your drive go zipping by (You can bypass this by omitting the v on the second tar). That's it copying all your files.
5) make the
6) Make any changes necessary to your
7) make a temporary boot disk ("dd if=/boot/vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024").
8) Shutdown the box normally and swap drives.
9) Boot using the temporary boot disk.
10) Login as root and run LILO ("/sbin/lilo").
11) Remove the bootdisk and reboot. Everything should work right.
They're doing what they've always done, protecting their own interests. Microsoft has always been about one thing: Money. I realized it when I saw what they did back in August '95 with Windows 95. They slapped a slick NeXT'ish shell on a bloated, buggy, crackwhore of an OS. They want to draw people in with flash and fluff then gouge them for unnecessary upgrades and technical support.
.conf file seems more user friendly and easier to administer than trying to hunt through help files and an obtuse GUI to find the same setting in the laberynthine Windows Registry.
Microsoft hates their customers. They say it when they blame others for obvious flaws in their products (Word virii, IIS exploits, Back Oriface, etc). They say it when they flash vaporware at people months/years before releasing the first crappy v1.0 beta. They say it when their EULA basically says "you're stuck with us now. Like it or lump it."
Their customers want something that's fast, stable, robust, and easy to administer. Now, since I'm a bit above the average Windows user (That's actually not meant to be boastful. It gets tiring when I'm constantly picking up other people's messes because I'm the only one who knows how) so to me, changing "MaxSpareServers" to a reasonable value in some
Microsoft could care less what their customers want. As long as people continue to pay them $90 for a bug-fix that's three years late, they'll continue to pay lip service to their customers (Remember, lies cost nothing) while they continue on their merry way to their next billion.
Offtopic: PHP3 isn't really something that can be compared with IIS. IIS is more appropriately compared with Apache, Zeus, Roxen Challenger, et al.
If you want to compare PHP3, compare it to ASP. I've not done much ASP work myself, but from what I've gathered, it's a way to embed dynamic content straight into HTML-esq pages and have the server execute them and spit out real HTML to the client. This is exactly what PHP3 does. I've used it and I find it quite powerful, particularly in the database integration field. It can be compiled with support for over a dozen different SQL database packages (Some of which I've never heard of, others I didn't know even had Linux clients). PHP3 can be compiled into a dynamicly loaded library that links it directly into Apache, giving it the same ability as IIS+ASP. There are even programs that will translate ASP pages to PHP3 pages (Check Freshmeat for it).
Something that bothered me about the Mindcraft studies that was partially explained in the earlier article posted here about saturating a T1/T3 on a single-processor Linux box, and still further explained in this article...
If NT is such hot stuff running a webserver, how come so many NT servers die horribly when they're slashdotted, yet slashdot (P2x2 256MB ram if I remember correctly) has enough processor time and bandwidth left over to customize the interface and most of the pages that it spits out? I have seen so many high-traffic NT sites bog down and sometimes just not respond when they get busy, yet most Linux/FreeBSD servers keep chugging right along.
I wonder if there's a way to benchmark that...
In typical style, everyone has jumped the gun prematurely. After reading the article, I can see the author's fears, but I'm not sure how founded they are. After all, all we have right now is a deal between two companies and the words "RedHat Linux" in the System Requirements.
The author calls for everyone to support the LSB and boycott anyone who doesn't. Well, my follow-up to that is "Show me the LSB." Last I heard, the thing wasn't even FINISHED yet. How are we supposed to support something that is so anamorphous?
According to their official statements, RedHat is totally committed to the LSB, they just aren't crowing about it. They have said that they're going to wait until it's finished before they start making noise about it.
I do agree that it's presents a troubling future. I for one would cry if Linux ever became balkenized. However, unlike the author, I don't see that as happening very easily. It would take a major change in the attitude of the community to allow anything like that to happen. We'd all have to return to being lazy, grain-fed consumers.
The differences between Linux distributions is actually very minor. From experience, I can say that for the most part, they work pretty interchangeably. I've used Slackware and RedHat on my boxes and I've helped install SuSE on other machines. RedHat, Caldera, SuSE and others all use RPM as their packaging format. The major differences besides that are in the location of files and libraries. But any self-respecting programer DOESN'T hard-code library paths except under EXTREME circumstances. That and as long as you keep up on the versions of libraries, most programs can exist happily.
Even though I use RedHat and could probably pretty easily install CodeWarrior, that doesn't mean I'm not going to help anyone who wants to install it on SuSE, Debian, or whichever. I imagine the majority of Linux users have the same attitude.
How do you figure? I just ran it on my (nearly) stock RedHat 5.2 system (Kernel 2.0.36). I've got an SB16PnP and it works just fine for me. Audio/Video is at least as good as rvplayer 5.0gold. Only thing that's irritating to me is that it keeps coming up asking for registration, even though I registered it.
I find it extremely odd that this DH Brown article points out several "facts" without explaining a few basic things.
1) Linux doesn't do SMP well.
What version of Linux are they testing? 2.0? 2.2? When it comes to SMP, there's a VAST difference.
2) Linux only supports up to 2gb of RAM.
In its current form, yes. Linux only supports 2gb of RAM. However, I'm willing to bet my left maple nut that 4gb is on the TODO list for 2.3.
Beyond that, the article was mostly rhetoric and jargon designed to confuse and mislead people.
I know most people will never read this, but after reading that article, I can't help but let my fingers fly and write something about what the author (Who didn't include his e-mail address, so I can't address these to him) said.
While the article has a nice pipe-dream inspiring it, the author makes a number of fairly critical mistakes. Additionally, there are several incorrect assertions. I'm not sure if these are unintentional ignorance, or malicious attempts to spin what we're doing.
In the article, the author asks the question "Why don't we stop development on Linux and all other alternative operating systems and concentrate on making Windows 9x / 2000 better?"
The short answer: We can't.
The long answer: Microsoft controls Windows with an iron fist. They add what features they want and ignore everything else. They have no economic interest in spending the additional [mb]illions of hours it would take to rummage through however many millions of lines of code Windows is up to and find the bugs that plague the system. They're raking in cash hand over fist, what would they stand to gain? Reputation? I don't think even the Microsoft Marketing Minions could pull that off.
The author states that we don't want to because we're anti-establishment and think we have something to gain by challenging the Microsoft juggernaut. Again, he is half-right. While there is a certain element of disgust rumbling through the computer world right now, that isn't unjustified.
I cannot count the number of times a bug in Windows or some Windows application has taken my system completely down. I have talked to literally thousands of people who have had the same thing happen. I cannot count the times I have heard people curse Windows, Microsoft, or Bill Gates directly.
We can't fix any of those because we don't have any of the source code. We can submit bug reports or requests for features, but from experience, I know that those are pretty much ignored unless it's something someone on the development team wants. If they even make it to the development team. Many times in large corporations, they don't; someone somewhere filters them out for some reason or another.
Why do we continue to work on Linux? Simple disenchantment with Microsoft isn't enough reason to work on a project this big. Why can't these people understand that?